Boom's MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

And then one day you find

ten years have got behind you.

ROGER WATERS, "Time", The Dark Side of the Moon

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And so they have, these ten years of grumpy, grouchy blogging.  Not a big deal, perhaps, but then one does not need much of a reason to write a blog post.  The question of what to write about, however, gave me a pause.  All too often anniversaries are treated as an excuse for self-congratulation or sentimentality, and I have never been fond of either.  Yet when I asked myself what was the first thing that came to my mind when I reflected on my ten years in the Dungeon, the answer turned out to be sentimental in the end.

Since I started this blog, the world has lost several people none of whom I knew personally, but whose work has enriched my life beyond measure.  Now that they are gone, the world has become a much colder and lonelier place for me to be in.  So, sentimental or not, I decided to use this anniversary post to mention these seven people - Boom's Magnificent Seven - as a way of reminding myself how incredibly lucky I feel to have been among their contemporaries.

ELLIOTT CARTER (1908 - 2012)

CHARLES ROSEN (1927 - 2012)

ROBERT HUGHES (1938 - 2012)

ROBIN WILLIAMS (1951 - 2014)

JERRY FODOR  (1935 - 2017)

OLIVER KNUSSEN (1952 - 2018)

PIERRE BOULEZ (1925 - 2016)

The company we keep...

Bad company
I can't deny
Bad, bad company
Till the day I die

PAUL ROGERS, SIMON KIRK, Bad Company 1974

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Buddhist monks, I'm told, are all good people.  Too bad I'm not interested in meditation, gardening, and other things with which they occupy themselves in their monasteries.  What I am interested in is what composers and musicians do.  Unlike Buddhist monks, however, musical artists are a checkered lot.  The ranks of even the most distinguished ones include murderers, supporters of totalitarian regimes, plagiarists, racists, pedophiles, fraudsters, pederasts, sadistic bullies, abusive husbands, habitual liars, and just plain assholes.  In short, with respect to variations in moral character, musical artists do not differ significantly from members of other professions, which is to say that, as a group, they are worse than Buddhist monks but better than convicted felons.

Despite its triviality, this sociological fact has given rise to countless hand-wringing think pieces by musicologists, historians, critics, and assorted cultural commentators, all asking if it is morally O.K. to enjoy musical works "when good art happens to bad people".  The need for such periodic soul-searching strikes me as strange.  After all, there have been no anguished think pieces about cases when, say, good plumbing happens to bad people.  And the reason there have been none is that no-one seems to think that the function of a plumbing installation has a moral dimension, or that one's use (appreciation, enjoyment) of a plumbing installation constitutes endorsement (if only implicit) of the plumber's private life.

Who gives a fuck about how it makes you feel!

Elliott Carter and Oliver Knussen

Formal analysis is not the only source of objective claims about music which are accountable to independently verifiable evidence.  A notable composition is likely to have a history, including its genesis from initial sketches to the final revision of the score, the evolution of its reception, the ways it may have been exploited for political propaganda or plagiarized in popular music, and more.  Then there are specific technical challenges the work may pose for performing musicians (including conductors).
     These, along with editorial matters pertaining to early musical notation and performance practice, constitute the domain of objective discourse on music.  The rest is impressionistic drivel which, despite the seeming objectivity of wording, is only about whatever it is that pops into the writer's head when he/she listens to (or reflects on) such-and-such piece of music.  When confronted with this kind of writing - whether in the form of metaphysical mumbling (Wagner), Marxist yapping (Adorno), feminist babbling (Susan McClary), or diarrhetic torrents of metaphors, free associations, and misused scientific concepts (insert here the name of any so-called new musicologist) - the only appropriate response I can think of is the one given by the title of this post.

Voyeurs. Stalkers. Biography readers.

I do not know which hand Tchaikovsky favored for the act of self-gratification.  I doubt anyone knows.  Still, it is conceivable (if by now very unlikely) that evidence concerning Tchaikovsky’s preference in that area may one day come to light.  Say, a fortuitously discovered letter from the composer’s brother Modest to one of Modest’s lovers in which it is mentioned that Tchaikovsky was a lefty.  Supposing this were to happen tomorrow, would you expect to read about Tchaikovsky’s left-handed masturbation in the composer’s updated biographies?

Two cheers for tabloid musicology!

The experience to which Mr. Carter's music gives authoritative access is that of belonging to a self-congratulating coterie, lately beside itself with rage at its loss of power to tyrannize the classical music community.
RICHARD TARUSKIN, letter to the Editor, New York Times, 27 July 1997.*
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There is no denying that the musicologist Richard Taruskin's cantankerous, pugnacious writing style can be refreshingly entertaining in today's climate of PC Jihadism, where sharply negative criticism is readily equated with bullying.  And when such criticism is directed at the works of those who happened not to be white heterosexual gentile males, the critic may end up with the career-destroying label of enemy of diversity, inclusion, equity, sustainability, social justice, and other Stalinist linguistic contortions whose meanings are known only to delusional academics, useless bureaucrats, and self-righteous Silicon Valley nerds.

A hugely succesful failure

ELLIOTT CARTER and PIERRE BOULEZ at Avery Fisher Hall before the 'Informal Evening' performance of Carter's Concerto for Orchestra on 11 February 1974

From most New York Philharmonic subscribers there was a sigh of relief when Pierre Boulez left the orchestra.  ...  [R]eliable reports have it that nobody was happier than the front office when Mr. Boulez went to Paris for good.
HAROLD C. SCHONBERG, Facing the Music, Simon and Schuster, 1981, p.362.
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What could have so upset the front office folks about Pierre Boulez' tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic?
     Was it Boulez's introduction of Rug Concerts and other unconventional concert formats such as Informal Evenings?  Not likely given that Boulez's Rug Concerts "played to a full house that greeted each piece with unrestrained enthusiasm"[1], and the series proved to be "enormously successful"[2].
     Was it because of decreased attendance due to Boulez's insistence on performing a substantial amount of 20th century modernist music?  Again not likely because the attendance rate at the Philharmonic was at 96% of capacity in Boulez's third year[3], rising to 99% in his last year, with the average over his entire tenure (1971-1977) being 97% [4].  This is slightly better than the 96% attendance rate under Boulez's successor Zubin Mehta[5], and vastly better than the 78-88% attendance rate during the tenure of the ridiculously overpaid Lorin Maazel three decades later[6].

With this in mind, I'm inclined to think that Harold Schonberg was simply full of shit, and his allusions to (unnamed) "reliable sources" and the (statistically invisible) aggrieved majority of Philharmonic subscribers are nothing more than a feeble attempt to camouflage his own intense dislike of post-war musical avant-garde and of Boulez as its most influential spokesman.  If I'm right, this is one example to support my view of Schonberg as a superb music writer - one whose books I re-read periodically for the sheer pleasure of their Hemingwayesque directness and powerfully projected personality - who also happened to be a spectacularly limited and biased music critic.

Yankee ingenuity!!!

U.S. Ranked Low in Math Literacy

ABC News Dec. 11, 2004

In a study of how good 15-year-olds are in math, the "big, bad" USA ranked 24 out of 29 countries.

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A serious problem, indeed.  And this is how American parents have dealt with it:

Then again, maybe not...

In an earlier post about Yo-Yo Ma's involvement with Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto I claimed to know - based on the live recording of one of Ma's performances - that Ma had no difficulties with the technical challenges posed by this concerto.  A couple of  days ago I received an email from the composer Wei-Chieh Lin (a student of Milton Babbitt) which considerably diminished my confidence in the above claim.  Here is the pertinent excerpt:

No place for amateurs...

Dozens of professional goats briefly took over a neighborhood in Boise

by Karin Brulliard August 3 at 11:18 AM (URL)

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Clearly the days of amateur goats are over (as are the days of literate journalists).  Today's world is a highly demanding and dangerous place where only a team of professional goats can get the job done.

A one-night stand to remember...

ELLIOTT CARTER with Daniel Barenboim and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall in 1994.

I can't think of a more appropriate way to describe the cellist Yo-Yo Ma's brief involvement with Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto.  Having had some experience with Carter's music in the past (he had played Carter's cello sonata brilliantly according to the composer), Ma must have had a pretty good idea of what to expect when he agreed to have a Carter concerto commissioned for him by the Chicago Symphony.  And the initial perusal of the finished score should have been enough for a musician of Ma's caliber to decide if he finds the music attractive enough to invest time and effort in mastering its numerous challenges.  Whatever went through Ma's head back then, he did learn the concerto, played the world premiere with the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim in September of 2001, then, a few weeks later, performed it again with the same forces at Carnegie Hall.

And that was it.  As far as I know, Ma has not played the Carter concerto ever since.

Perhaps engagements to play this concerto weren't sufficiently lucrative compared to those where Ma could play the numbingly familiar crowd-pleasers (Schumann, Dvorak, Shostakovich) he had played for decades.  Or maybe Ma decided that public performances of challenging modernist music were incompatible with his status as a beloved 'People's Cellist'.  One thing I know is that Ma had no difficulties with the technical challenges posed by this concerto.  I know this because one of Ma's performances was recorded for broadcast, and the recording documents a performance that is simply stunning not only for the ease and confidence with which Ma dispatches the solo part, but also for his (and Daniel Barenboim's) understanding that, despite its rhythmic complexities and non-tonal harmonic language, Carter's piece should be played as a modernist version of an emotionally turbulent Romantic concerto.

A victory for modal metaphysics!

 13-year-old boy bitten by possible shark off Fire Island

By Aaron Katersky, Joyeeta Biswas, Jul 18, 2018, 1:29 PM ET

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No-one will now laugh at philosophers who spend sleepless nights worrying about the ontological status of possible objects.  As the above headline shows, possible objects are as real as the actual ones, and are capable of causing considerable harm to those who pay no attention to modal metaphysics.

I wonder if the metaphysical awakening initiated by ABC News will soon lead to Nobel Prizes for possible vaccines, long prison sentences for possible crimes, and a Netflix remake of Steven Spielberg's first blockbuster classic, albeit with this metaphysically updated title:

A very sad day for art music...

Oliver Knussen and Elliott Carter in 2008

Just found out that Oliver Knussen died yesterday aged 66.

No other conductor gave such lightness, sparkle, and forward momentum to the music of Elliott Carter; and these qualities also characterize Knussen's own delightfully playful compositions.

What a loss...

From the poster boys of the Wisdom Industry

[Those whose] work is the use of the body, and if this is the best that can come from them - are slaves by nature. For them it is better to be ruled...
ARISTOTLE, Politics

Wives, servants, and children are possessed in a way akin to our possession of objects. If they flee, they must be returned to the owner if he demands them, without regard for the cause that led them to flee.   ...
A child that comes into the world apart from marriage is born outside the law (for the law is marriage) and therefore outside the protection of the law. [The society] can ignore its existence (since it rightly should not have come to exist in this way), and can therefore also ignore its annihilation.
IMMANUEL KANT, The Metaphysics of Morals
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No wonder  it was such a happy day in Richard Feynman's life when his son Carl abandoned philosophy for computer science...

Summer reading

Few things in life are less rewarding than reading a typical Ph.D. thesis in the Humanities.  This one, however, is an exception not only because of its topic, but also because the writing keeps clear of the wooden, repetitive, jargon-laden style favored by academics who, in their heart of hearts, know they have nothing worthy to say but still take hundreds of pages to deliver a few trivial observations on some inconsequential subject matter.

Composing Freedom: Elliott Carter's 'Self-Reinvention' 
and the Early Cold War
DANIEL GUBERMAN
U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012
(Available as free PDF download from the U. of North Carolina Digital Archive.)

ABSTRACT:  In this dissertation I examine Elliott Carter's development from the end of the Second World War through the 1960s arguing that he carefully constructed his postwar compositional identity for Cold War audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The majority of studies of Carter's music have focused on technical aspects of his methods, or roots of his thoughts in earlier philosophies. Making use of published writings, correspondence, recordings of lectures, compositional sketches, and a drafts of writings, this is one of the first studies to examine Carter's music from the perspective of the contemporary cultural and political environment. In this Cold War environment Carter emerged as one of the most prominent composers in the United States and Europe. I argue that Carter's success lay in part due to his extraordinary acumen for developing a public persona. And his presentation of his works resonated with the times, appealing simultaneously to concert audiences, government and private foundation agents, and music professionals including impresarios, performers and other composers. This detailed study of a single composer sheds new light on how artists were able to negotiate the complex economies of the Cold War artistic environment.

Like the common cold...

Like the common cold, a bout of stupidity is something we all have to endure from time to time.
BOOM (in one of his more lucid moments)
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And when the symptoms of stupidity have been displayed in public (say, in the form of a blog post), a diagnostic postscript seems entirely appropriate.  Which brings me to my earlier, flippant and decidedly unkind remarks about the symphonies of Anton Bruckner.

If Grandma had a dick ...

Roger Sessions (seated right) in 1959, with
Douglas Moore (seated left) and (standing left to right)
Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter,
Wallingford Riegger, William Schuman,
Walter Piston

That's what history is: the story of everything that needn't have been like that.
CLIVE JAMES, Cultural Amnesia.

If Grandma had a dick, she would have been Grandpa.
A sober response to metaphysical speculations about counterfactuals and possible worlds.
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This is as sentimental as Clive James ever allowed himself to feel on the printed page: A memorable turn of phrase infused with longing for a world where human decisions and subsequent actions - which is what history is ultimately about - are not subject to the tyranny of causal determinism.  Alas, so far causal determinism is the only coherent perspective on how the world works, and it tells us that everything happens exactly as it has to, if often not as we wish it had.  The latter may give rise to feelings of regret, but to elevate such feelings to the status of 'ontological detectors' of how things might have been is sentimental daydreaming at best.

A Mozart puzzle...

If I don't practice one day, I know it. Two days, the critics know it. Three days, the public knows it.
JASCHA HEIFETZ
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In his book Mozart: A Life, Maynard Solomon gives the following description of Mozart's typical daily routine:

During his early years in Vienna, Mozart would customarily arise at six o'clock, be at his desk by seven, and compose until nine or ten, when he would make the rounds of his pupils, giving lessons until one o'clock.  "Then I lunch," he reported to his sister...  Returning to his room after several hours of social visits, he would again compose ... "I often go on writing until one - and am up again at six." ... With variations, that was Mozart's daily routine as he described it in his letters home... [On some] days the only time he had for composing was in the evenings, "and of that I can never be sure, as I am often asked to perform at concerts." (p.309).

With Mozart's time divided between composing, teaching, socializing, and frequent concert performances, the above description of his daily routine suggests that Mozart had no time to practice at all, or at least that he did not practice regularly enough to warrant mentioning practice among his daily activities.  This I find very hard to believe, but since I have no compelling evidence to the contrary, the best I can do is offer a few rather inclusive speculations on this matter.

Modernism as an attitude problem

Mr. Carter never has made concessions to his listeners. ... It will take many hearings for the relationships in the score to assert themselves.
HAROLD C. SCHONBERG [1]
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So there you have it: An innovative composer's pursuit of his artistic vision is an attitude problem.  The composer is described as one who refuses to "make concessions to his listeners", who is "uncompromising", who expects his listeners do heavy mental work involved in keeping track of a bewilderingly rapid succession of seemingly unrelated sound events.  Put in a euphemism-free way, the composer is an arrogant motherfucker who pursues his aesthetic ideals at the expense of his listeners' desire for pleasantly comfortable aural experiences after a long and busy day at the office (or at the country club).

When the Russians were especially enthusiastic...

Roger Sessions and Jean Martinon

The Russians I met ... were familiar with some American scores, and were especially enthusiastic about those of [Roger] Sessions.
ELLIOTT CARTER [1]
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These days no-one is especially enthusiastic about the symphonies of Roger Sessions.  Not even a little enthusiastic.  Too abstruse for some, too old-fashioned for others, Sessions' symphonies have been confined for decades to the dark and musty basement of music history where they pass time swapping tales of former glory with the symphonies of Dittersdorf, Spohr, Ries, Onslow, Kalliwoda, Wilms, Reinecke, Rubinstein, and other now almost completely forgotten composers.

Querying the dead

Listening to a Webern score without being able to read it must be rather like studying a great  architectural mastepiece without having access to a ground plan.  ...  The new [music], when it eschews any links with the past, can be absorbed only by those who are able to hear the music and read the score (the aural equivalent of the architect's blueprint).

ERICH LEINSDORF [1]

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Why should listening to a piece of art music be like studying a piece of architecture (or anything else)? Why shouldn’t it be instead like taking a tour of a palace (castle, cathedral)? 

     Does one have to study the shooting script and the production designer’s storyboard in order to “absorb” a film of Eisenstein, Godard, or Tarkovsky?  Or read the source code of computer programs used to produce some of the art works at MOMA in order to “absorb” such works?  

What exactly does the ability to read a score amount to? 

     When in 1854 the conductor Hans von Bülow sent Richard Wagner some scores to review, Wagner responded with a letter in which he admitted his borderline incompetence (if not impotence) as a score reader:

     ...[H]ow am I to get any clear idea of these [scores]? You know how abominably I play the piano, and that I cannot master anything by that means unless I can get a clear conception [of the music] beforehand.  What I get from a simple reading [of the score] is not enough ... to arrive at an idea of a composition.[2]

     Did Wagner have the ability to read a score?